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Staff Picks: The Best Films of 2016

2016 here at 4:3 was a year of incremental change. We brought many new writers into our ranks, finally covered Locarno Film Festival on the ground and, most notably, completely redesigned the site in November. Just as we moved slowly so too it seemed did some of the best cinematic offerings of 2016, at least those that graced Australian shores—theatrical or otherwise. Among the films that crop up fairly often in the lists below are a three-hour German comedy, a five-hour Japanese drama about women in their 40s, a terrific 7-hour film (or it is a television show? Who really cares?) about O.J. Simpson, as well as suitably languid offerings from Richard Linklater and Frederick Wiseman.

Just like last year, for this Staff Picks piece we asked contributors to submit a list (ranked or unranked) of films that in their mind could be considered a 2016 release, along with an explanation of their choices. By expanding what films could be considered beyond theatrical release and by asking writers to elaborate on their choices, we want to put the emphasis on the discovery of individual films rather than presenting any consensus picks.

Note: We have a review for most of the films listed below. You will be able to click through on the film titles when they are first mentioned in a writer’s submission.

Conor Bateman

This year, perhaps more than most, I’ve neglected theatrical releases. It’s too easy to say that the difference between festival and theatrical releases is quality (fear not, I saw a lot of thoroughly mediocre festival flicks this year) but it’s more got to do with interest. Out of the films listed below (unnumbered, because the order is vague and likely to change—though Elle, pictured above, is definitely the best of the bunch) only two did not have their Australian premiere at a festival: Spotlight was an Oscar-adjacent release and Justin Timberlake + The Tennessee Kids went straight onto Netflix.

Elle (Paul Verhoeven): Last year I fell in love with Verhoeven’s relentlessly entertaining 1995 film Showgirls, so it was nice to see him still firing on all cylinders twenty years later with Elle, a twisty character study that withholds any definite sense of a character’s interiority. I’m loathe to couch it in any real genre terms because the film actively plays with its own perception and categorisation. Suffice to say, Elle is discomforting and hilarious in equal measure, and only works as well as it does because of a magnetic Isabelle Huppert performance.

Cameraperson (Kirsten Johnson): Oh, how I wish I found the time to write at length on Kirsten Johnson’s feature this year. The best edited film I’ve seen in some time, Cameraperson is a patchwork affair which hums with a surprising directness.

Toni Erdmann(Maren Ade): The most lauded festival film of 2016 still managed to completely surprise me across its three-hour runtime. Feel the need to laugh and cry at the same time? There’s a musical sequence in here that’ll do you just right.

Certain Women(Kelly Reichardt): A gorgeous, contemplative triptych that I wanted to rewatch immediately as the credits began to roll.

Personal Shopper(Olivier Assayas): Kristen Stewart is in top form in Assayas’ singular feature. Ghost texts, a surprisingly affecting mediation of death and memory, a critique of celebrity detachment and a camp Hitchcockian thriller rolled into one. Look out for it in Australian cinemas in 2017, it’s likely to be one of the best things we see get a theatrical release.

Happy Hour(Ryûsuke Hamaguchi): A three-part film that screened as one whole at the Melbourne International Film Festival earlier this year, Ryûsuke Hamaguchi’s Happy Hour feels like a novella adapted note perfect; it’s the longest film I saw this year (317 minutes) but it has also been one of the most rewarding films to discuss and reflect on in the many months since.

Spotlight (Tom McCarthy): It feels naff to give a shout out to the Oscars’ Best Picture winner and I feel like Spotlight in particular doesn’t need too much championing. So, to be brief: it’s a dry procedural affair that was very much in my wheelhouse.

Chevalier(Athina Rachel Tsangari): I know the new Linklater is also an amusing and perhaps more precise study of masculinity but Chevalier is my pick of the two. Tsangari is two from two, following Attenberg and Chevalier marks another good script from Efthymis Filippou, who remains one of the most important and most undersung members of the Greek Weird Wave.

I want to also make note of some of the really impressive shortform work I saw this year, including Guy Maddin and the Johnson cousins’ delirious Bring Me the Head of Tim Horton, Cyprien Gaillard’s 3-D hyper-cityscape Nightlife, Daïchi Saïto’s singular Engram of Returning, AJ Schnack’s powerful Field of Vision short Speaking Is Difficult and, of course, 4:3 favourites Soda_Jerk with The Was, their collaboration with The Avalanches.

Jeremy Elphick

I’ve managed to miss Toni Erdmann at every festival it’s played so far, I didn’t get a chance to catch Elle at the theatre, and I haven’t caught up and seen Cameraperson yet. I’m not sure if I’ll like any of them more than this list when I get around to watching them in the coming weeks, but as far things stand, the list of films below are the works I’ve taken the most from in 2016. I was lucky enough to see a few of these at Locarno International Film Festival and Brisbane Asia Pacific Film Festival, and as a result, some of them might not have screened yet in Sydney, or Australia. I feel like there’s something really personal and precise about each one of these films, where even those offering a familiar approach to time, space, or genre still manage to find ways to invert and challenge the form – as well as the viewers conception of the potentiality of cinema. Since this is a fairly disparate list in terms of what the directors are achieving, there’s no ranking here. There are a handful of films on this list that have had a lasting effect on how I think about cinema and it’s possibilities, so in my view, it’s been quite a good year.

1. Toni Erdmann (Maren Ade): Dismissing Ade’s masterwork as an obvious festival pick obscures the deep well of sadness that makes it so satisfying. Its central father and daughter chart different paths across the shifting earth, face unique sense of alienation, and converge right when they both need it most in the marvellously paced three hours. When the world is moving on without you, treat it to some Whitney Houston.

2. Ecco Homo (Richard Lowenstein, Lynn-Maree Milburn): Ghost Pictures remains a force for indiminishable good in the Australian film industry; iconoclastic in their stories about iconoclasts. Their study of artist Troy Davies entertainingly mirrors his penchant for myth and legend, but also scrutinises the toxicity it caused among family and friends, before illuminating his psychology with abiding spiritual reverence.

3. Everybody Wants Some!! (Richard Linklater): You’ll find few directors more attuned to his personal prides and failings than Linklater, nor more well-adjusted in their wake. The humour, glow and showiness of his cinematic college bender only thrives through the melancholy of lost time and latent wisdom.

4. Cameraperson (Kirsten Johnson): The on-the-fly creative impulses of a veteran documentarian become the map of her career-long relationship with trauma and accountability. An emotional feat of editing, and an amazing jaunt through time and place.

5. Paterson (Jim Jarmusch) Even when putting aside the military-PTSD subtext, Adam Driver cements himself as a fierce and sincere performer here, thanks to the keen sincerity and humour of one of the greatest living American directors…

6. Elle(Paul Verhoeven): …and if Isabelle Huppert somehow hasn’t done the same by now, her wonderfully dark and funny collaboration with Paul Verhoeven is surely the only evidence we’ll need.

7. Hunt for the Wilderpeople (Taika Waititi): Who knows how much of New Zealand’s most successful director will thrive amid the Disney-corporate morass of Moana and Thor: Ragnarok? In the meantime, Wilderpeople marches through its runaway-orphan children’s story with an impressive and knowingly silly goose step. “Ri-cky Ba-ker, ahhhh…”

8. The Red Turtle (Michael Dudok de Wit): The computer-animated zippiness of Minions et al looks miniscule against the hand-drawn, tsunami-like scale of de Wit and Ghibli’s desert island dreamscape. None will get a score this unshakeable, either.

9. Cop Car (Jon Watts): The incumbent Spider-Man director’s lean crime thriller only got a release in Australia this year, and worked as the best possible chaser after the tepidness of Stranger Things‘ own dark, kid-centric pastiche.

10. The Fits (Anna Rose Holmer): a beguiling and surreal coming-of-age story plays out in the school halls of Cincinatti, where her lead star (Royalty Hightower) fears both a mysterious disease and the birth of a new identity.

1. Cosmos (Andrzej Żuławski): Żuławski goes out on a manic high, turning language—spoken and cinematic—inside out until it finally disintegrates in a last hurrah of comedic hysteria. The year’s most exhilaratingly annoying film.

3. In Jackson Heights (Frederick Wiseman): Wiseman takes to the streets and lives of Queens, New York; as richly detailed and empathetic a work as anything the venerable filmmaker has produced.

4. Your Name (Makoto Shinkai): Body-swapping, gender-bending, time-jumping teen anime melodrama that’s as close to a ridiculous funhouse of Obayashi, Donnie Darko and mid-period Resnais as one could hope for.

5. Wiener-Dog(Todd Solondz): Todd Solondz’s wonderfully caustic view of humanity remains as unrepentant as ever. Less remarked upon: his way with a gorgeous sequence, be it Ellen Burstyn’s delirious vision of her angel-demon tormentors or a long tracking shot of dog excrement set to classical music that’s a moving as it is disgusting.

6. Personal Shopper (Olivier Assayas): If anyone’s still in doubt that Kristen Stewart is the great actress of her time, ask yourself how many others can sustain a 47-hour text message conversation with a supernatural stalker using just her inimitable stillness…

7. Certain Women (Kelly Reichardt): …or wear a cable-knit sweater-vest with such a detailed sense of interiority? Kelly Reichardt’s triptych of short stories, featuring Stewart, Laura Dern, Michelle Williams and newcomer Lily Gladstone, is another of her quiet wonders of narrative form.

8. Hail, Caesar! (Joel and Ethan Coen): Forget La La Land, this is the best Hollywood musical throwback of the year. The brothers’ invocation of “movie magic” has more on its mind than empty nostalgia, deceptively wrestling with existential crises as fraught as those of A Serious Man.

9. Everybody Wants Some!! (Richard Linklater): Richard Linklater takes an affectionate, super funny lap through some questionable bro culture, only to flip the whole thing on its head with an unexpected, ’80s art school teen movie sequence that holds a magic mirror up to his dude narrative.

10. What Happened to Her (Kristy Guevara-Flanagan): My favourite short film of the year, a deftly-edited montage of female corpses from Hollywood movies and TV—everyone from Laura Palmer to CSI’s victim of the week—married to a spectral narration from the actress who played dead in River’s Edge (1987).

By day, I hold all sorts of different opinions about all sorts of different films. But by night, my long-held dedication to horror reigns as supremely now as it did when I took my first tentative steps into genre fandom as a kid. For a few years now I have therefore had two end of year lists running simultaneously: one for cinema in general, and a horror specific one. While it is the former that I have tended to share more publicly, the 4:3 invitation to join in their end of year shenanigans seems too good an opportunity to let slide. And it is in this spirit that I share this, my horror highlights of 2016.

If there’s a trend across the ten films I’ve (somewhat arbitrarily) selected, it’s a tendency toward the panoramic, unwieldy, discursive; whether it be the free-associative Cameraperson, the billowy, shapeshifting, tone-morphing Toni Erdmann, the panoramic survey of In Jackson Heights, the druggy, depressive distension of Malgre la nuit, and of course, the five-and-a-half-hour epic portrait of female friendship and all its complexities in Happy Hour. Perhaps I’m unconsciously reacting against the compact, plot-driven form of episodic television and its increasing primacy over cinema in the cultural landscape (this was indeed a terrible year for mainstream cinema, but who cares); in any case, these were the ones that took my mind to the most exciting places, and still continue to.

Cobbling together this top 10 brought me face to face with the reality of my scandalously narrow film viewing habits. For one, my consumption of new releases this year was pretty confined to festivals, and within said festivals I tended toward picking films with familiar names and faces in them—and that meant I wound up spending most of my cinema-bound hours watching stuff by relatively established ‘indie’ white guys. Hence, the resultant list is perhaps more indicative of what I neglected to see than the product of an informed assessment of 2016’s cinematic oeuvre. You have been warned.

Caveats aside, I do feel each of the above films to be completely deserving of whatever merit their appearance here signifies. To briefly justify my choices: I got horrifyingly woke with Hypernormalisation and Lo and Behold: Reveries of a Connected World, both harbingers of apocalypse in their own ways. I learned about how the filmmaking process falls together, in De Palma, and falls apart, in Bring Me the Head of Tim Horton. My dose of psychedelic body horror was served up by Antibirth, whilst Elle proved by turns subversively gripping and darkly humorous. The line between laughter and tears was expertly muddied in pitch black ‘comedies’ Wiener-Dog and Entertainment. And I was enchanted by the magical worlds of The Love Witch, Anna Biller’s technicolour occult feminist fantasy, and Adam Green’s Aladdin, which mounted its goofy satire of late capitalism on sets made of cardboard and papier mâché.

As it turns out, a disproportionate number of these films were screened at the Sydney Underground Film Festival (even though I actually saw a couple of them elsewhere), so props to them for their curatorial wisdom and/or inadvertently quite specifically targeting my filmic tastes.

Despite 2016 being a horrid, no-good year politically, in terms of films it proved to be a breath of fresh air. That’s because I was consciously drawn to an aspect of films I believe, we tend to overlook: their musicality. By that, I don’t just mean a film’s score or a soundtrack, but also the internal rhythm of a narrative and its ability to control the audience. Mehta’s Aligarh was one of the first films I watched this year, and yet, each frame is seared into my mind. Asrani’s script takes the topical issue of homosexuality—recently recriminalised by the courts—in an Indian context and paints a harrowing portrait of loneliness and alienation. And is it possible to talk about musicality without mentioning The Childhood of a Leader? The use of Walker’s background score makes the film’s viewing a truly transformative experience, one I’m going to re-visit again and again.

However, it’s only after watching Toni Erdmann that you start to get some sense of the broader essence of what musicality entails. The absurd comic beats are delicately wrapped around the larger narrative, protecting the human sensibility hiding within. Kashyap’s return to form, Psycho Raman, plays with the idea of musicality through beats of violent acts on screen. Anvari’s highly impressive debut Under the Shadow is equally effective as pointed political commentary while holding its own as a nuanced horror film.

Frederick Wiseman’s In Jackson Heights and Kirsten Johnson’s Cameraperson play with the ‘auteur versus subject’ binary in highly creative, yet personal ways. Kaili Blues takes us into a dream-like visual state, one where the distinction between past and present is deliberately manipulated through editing and rhythmic beats. I have to thank Netflix for the last two mentions on my list. I am so glad to have caught Manjule’s Sairat. A lot of the more interesting cinematic experiments in Indian cinema are happening far away from the pariah of Bollywood. With the success and wider accessibility of films like Sairat and Vetrimaan’s Visaranai, here’s hoping the breadth and diversity of Indian cinema becomes more noticeable globally.

1. Certain Women(Kelly Reichardt): A certain director made this a must-see for me. But it’s the central quartet of performances that makes it a must-see-again-as-soon-as-possible. What a triumph of compassion and calm.

2. OJ: Made in America (Ezra Edelman): Call it an ESPN miniseries. I call it my second favourite film of 2016.

3. Cameraperson (Kirsten Johnson): One hell of a cine-memoir, bridging the raw humanity that exists on either end of a camera lens.

4. Elle(Paul Verhoeven): Juliette Binoche turned down my number 8 choice because it was “too dark,” which is why Huppert >>> Binoche. Always.

5. De Palma (Noah Baumbach, Jake Paltrow): A mathematics/physics geek becomes a king of cinematic sex and violence.. .and an alleged misogynist. But seeing as Verhoeven has yet to be made, slot 5 goes to De Palma.

6. Paterson(Jim Jarmusch): How can something so mannered and mulled over and deliberate feel so liberating, so philosophically lithe?

8. The Childhood of a Leader (Brady Corbet): Apparently inspired by Bresson, Dreyer, Kubrick, Pialat, none of whom should feel the need to spin in their graves. At least not until the final five minutes.

9. Kaili Blues (Gan Bi): So seduced was I by this humid Chinese daydream—and the scrappy long take that is its centrepiece—that my occasional bafflement barely seemed to register…or matter.

10. Fire at Sea(Gianfranco Rosi) / Mediterranea(Jonas Carpignano): It’s a cheat, but these two vastly different films about the refugee/migrant crisis have a synergistic effect on me I simply must acknowledge.

Ivan Čerečina

Sixty Six was the find of the year for me, and it unfortunately didn’t get much of a run at festivals here in Australia. I wrote in my review that Klahr was able to wring out something very personal from a relatively impersonal archive of pop culture ephemera. This I still think is true, but it strikes me as also being a delicate summation of Klahr’s craft updated for the era of digital filmmaking.

I saw Paul Verhoeven speak at the Cinémathèque Française earlier this year, where there was a retrospective of his films playing over the course of a week. As part of the retrospective, Verhoeven was invited to program some films that had inspired him over the years, of which two were by Alfred Hitchcock. The experience of watching Elleis similar to that of watching Hitchcock’s crueller films (Notorious, Rear Window, Vertigo); one gets the same feeling of being played by the filmmaker, of addition and subtraction, of scenes building and playing off our interpretation of the last.

Fire at Sea is Flahertian in the same way that Elle is Hitchcockian. Shades of the dramatisation that have their roots in The Man of Aran and The Louisiana Story rub up against sobering footage from the biggest humanitarian crisis of our time.

Paterson shows that Jarmusch is probably at his best when using an episodic narrative structure (Stranger Than Paradise, Dead Man etc).

In a year dominated by the U.S. presidential race, and punctuated with one political scandal after another, I was baffled by the lack of parallels drawn to the petty, competitive men of Athina Rachel Tsangari’s Chevalier. Sure, it plays beautifully as a straight comedy, but the political satire, revealed through the arbitrary scoring system, gratuitous displays of hypermasculinity and shameless underhandedness, is what resonated most with me. The boat-bound men behave in an unnervingly similar fashion to that of candidates on a campaign trail—just as absurd, egotistical and ruthless, and just as far removed from the rest of society.

Speaking of which, this was the year I became acquainted with the solipsistic protagonists around which the exquisitely playful worlds of Hong Sang-soo revolve. Right Now, Wrong Then was a revelation and I was quickly seduced by Hong’s offbeat humour, obsession with the minutiae of human behaviour and repertoire of distinctive structural and formal devices. Thanks to the fortuitous timing of the MCA’s Contemporary Film Series’ focus on Hong, I had the opportunity to catch up with three of his earlier films (The Day He Arrives, Nobody’s Daughter Haewon and A Virgin Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors) which, when viewed together, served to highlight the subtleties and variations of such a unified body of work.

I am grateful to have six deserving films by women in my top 10, and that so many others share my enthusiasm for those titles. That said, if I have to read one more Tweet about some dude’s valiant effort to see 52 films by women in a year, I may very well blow up that website. I mean, if you struggle to get to 52—when you’ve logged over 200 films made by men on Letterboxd in that same period—then you’re not trying hard enough, are you? And while I’m at it: not every film made by a woman is a goddamn masterpiece, nor should it be. May the patronising patriarchy die with the end of 2016.

HMs: Sunset Song, Being 17, The Son of Joseph, The Handmaiden, Certain Women, I, Daniel Blake, The Love Witch, Lost & Beautiful, Maggie’s Plan, The Death of Louis XIV, The Mermaid, The Shallows, Goldstone, The Other Side.